FORT PIERCE ? The crew of the destroyer USS Gearing, DD-710, and two others were just going ashore at the Mayport Naval Station harbor in October 1962, expecting some liberty when the general quarters sounded, bringing them all back on board.

"A lot of the men were in the telephone booth bank making plans and they literally had to be pulled out and put back on board," said Mike Mett, 73, who was a newly commissioned lieutenant at the time. "No one knew what was up, just something was going on."

The ships hurried back to sea.

Later that night, Oct. 22, the captain told the crew they were assigned to "quarantine" Cuba because the Russians were building bases for medium range missiles on the Communist island. Mett, now a Fort Pierce resident, was a navigator and legal officer for the Gearing.

Fifty years after the Cuban missile crisis, Mett said he believes current-day leaders should study what happened that night in October when the world's two most powerful nations were at the brink of war.

Navy ships were stationed along the eastern edge of the Bahamas and south around Cuba, said Mett, who earned a history degree from Yale University. The men listened to the radio as President John F. Kennedy announced the quarantine.

Mett said the men on the blockade fleet had no idea of the intense diplomatic maneuvers being made between Washington and Moscow. They knew only they had orders to stop and board any ship trying to go into Cuba.

Most of the Soviet ships headed for Cuba either stopped, slowed down or turned back.

All except the tanker Bucharest, which was a Soviet naval vessel. The tanker kept coming, and the destroyer and the aircraft carrier Essex were told to stop it.

When the Gearing approached the Bucharest, talking to it by heliograph, the Soviet ship slowed but did not stop. The Gearing was 200 yards from the tanker preparing boarding parties. The main guns were swung to bear on the Soviet ship.

"It was touch-and-go," said Mett. "Someone realized that if one of our guns accidentally fired, World War III would be on and they were turned away from the tanker."

But the men could not understand why Washington told them not to board the ship. "We were unhappy," Mett said.

The orders came to let the tanker go. Mett said the crew had no idea what was going on. "When the Bucharest got to Havana, there were big stories in the Cuban papers about how this ship had smashed the imperialist blockade."

A few days later it was announced that Russia was withdrawing its missiles and the United States pledged it would not invade Cuba.

"I believe the legacy of the Cuban missile crisis is that the military and diplomats working together can settle many issues without going to war," said Mett. "I hope our present day leaders know that lesson."

Mett, who was born in Milwaukee, Wisc., and graduated from Naval Officer Candidate School and the Navy Justice School at Newport, R.I., left the active duty Navy to earn a law degree. He served in the Naval Reserve rising to the rank of lieutenant commander. He later served as a county commissioner in Milwaukee, then came to Florida in 1980.